This Bestselling Book Guarantees To Put Your Kid To Sleep In Seconds
Be careful parents, this book can put you to sleep, too.
Gorodenkoff / Shutterstock Picture this: you're a best-selling author giving a reading of your book, and instead of a captive audience hanging on your every word, they're all fast asleep. If you were anybody but Carl-Johan Forssen Ehrlin, you might be a little upset.
The Rabbit Who Wants To Fall Asleep, however, is a book that was designed to help children to relax, focus, and eventually drift off. And this sleepy-time book topping the Amazon charts is self-published.
It isn't that the story is boring, as there are many psychological techniques used in the book; even the actual vocal reading of the book is designed to encourage sleep, with emphasis on certain words such as "feeling more tired" and "allow yourself to fall asleep."
Another device used to help children connect with the character is the insertion of the child's name at various points. It's difficult not to yawn when someone is yawning, and at various points in the story are indicators that the reader should yawn.
In the book, word repetitions and run-on sentences aren't bad writing; they're devices to relax and calm the child, getting them ready for sleep.
In an article on Yahoo, Dr. Umakanth Khatwa, director of the sleep laboratory at Boston Children's Hospital, says, "If you can calm the child down enough to eliminate their anxiety, they will enter a period of relaxation and sleep will take over."
But the book doesn't work for every child.
"It's most effective in children between the ages of two and a half to nine," Khatwa says. "In this range, they're old enough to understand the language, but young enough to believe in the story."
In the story, Roger the Rabbit and his mother go on a quest to find sleep. Forssen Ehrlin uses deliberate language patterns and sentence structures.
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"The entire story is focused on getting the child involved, and to get the child to identify with Roger, who will fall asleep in the end," Forssen Ehrlin explains.
Although there are illustrations, parents/caretakers are strongly encouraged to read in a dim room with the child lying down, not looking at the pictures.
"This makes it easier for them to focus on the flow of the words, rather than going off on a tangent about one of the pictures," Forssen Ehrlin told Yahoo.
Be careful, though. Hearing The Rabbit Who Wants To Fall Asleep has been known to work on adults, too. Don't listen to it unless you're ready for some Zzzzs.
Christine Schoenwald is a writer, performer, and frequent contributor to YourTango. She's had articles featured in The Los Angeles Times, Salon, Bustle, Medium, Huffington Post, Business Insider, and Woman's Day, among many others.